The Funniest Joke in the World
"The Funniest Joke in the World" is the title most frequently used for written references to a Monty Python's Flying Circus comedy sketch, which is also known by two other phrases that appear within it, "Joke Warfare" and "Killer Joke", the latter being the most commonly used spoken title used to refer to it. The premise of the sketch is fatal hilarity: the joke is simply so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies laughing.
Broadcast
The sketch appeared in the first episode of the television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, which was titled "Whither Canada", first shown on October 5, 1969. The sketch was later remade in a shorter version for the film And Now For Something Completely Different; it is also available on the CD-ROM game of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
Summary
 | This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (May 2008) |
The sketch is set in Finchley during World War II, when Ernest Scribbler, a British "manufacturer of jokes" (Michael Palin), creates the funniest joke in the world and promptly dies laughing. His mother (Eric Idle) enters the room and finds her son dead. Horrified, she carefully takes the crumpled paper from his hand and reads it, believing it to be a suicide note. She then begins laughing hysterically, falls over and dies. A Scotland Yard inspector (Graham Chapman) retrieves the joke, but despite somber music and the chanting of laments by other officers (John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin) to create a depressing mood, reads it and also dies laughing.
It is finally given over to the British Army which sends a motorcycle courier to collect it. The joke is then tested on a dim-witted and bespectacled army lance corporal (Terry Jones) on Salisbury Plain. After a few seconds he comprehends it, sniggers, and promptly falls over dead. This impresses the senior officers, observing in a bunker at safe distance. The joke is then translated into German. The narrator says that the German version was over 60,000 times more powerful than Britain's "great pre-war joke", upon which the scene cuts to the famous newsreel shot of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returning to the United Kingdom holding the Munich Agreement, in reference to its failure to prevent Hitler from annexing any more land. During the winter of 1943, the joke was translated, with each word being translated by a different person — because seeing too much of the joke would prove fatal. The narrator (Chapman) adds that one translator accidentally caught a glimpse of two words and was hospitalized for weeks.
The translation is given to British soldiers who do not speak German, because not understanding what they are saying is the only way to survive reading the joke aloud. The joke is used for the first time on 8 July, 1944 in the Ardennes by the soldiers, who read the German version aloud on the battlefield, and the German soldiers simply fall over dead from laughter.
In the television version, a British soldier (Palin) is captured and forced to tell the joke to the Germans. Initially, Palin tells his German captors, "How do you make a Nazi Cross?" Upon the Schutzstaffel officer saying he does not know, Palin steps on his foot as he says "tread on his corns". Then in order to gain the information, a Gestapo officer tickles Palin into telling the joke. However, as hearing the joke proves deadly, his captors (John Cleese, Chapman, and Terry Gilliam) die laughing and he escapes. The Germans work to produce an equally deadly joke.
In the movie version, another scene of the joke being tested in open warfare is shown, with doughboys running through an open field amid artillery fire shouting the joke at the Germans, who fall over dead laughing in response. Afterward, a German field hospital is shown with several dozen German soldiers with bandages on their heads with blood stains, laughing incessantly. German doctors, attending to their "wounds", have gauze balls inserted in their ears to block out the laughter.
The Germans soon formulate a counter-joke, which is translated into English and played over the radio to London, but with no success.
Different jokes are used in the television and film versions of the sketch. Footage from Triumph of the Will is used where it seems like Adolf Hitler is announcing the counter-joke to his party members: "My dog has no nose." "How does it smell?" "Awful!"
The joke is finally laid to rest when "peace broke out" at the end of the war. All countries agree to a Joke Warfare ban at a "special session of the Geneva convention". The last paper copy of the joke is under a monument bearing the inscription "To the Unknown Joke" (as compared with the British Unknown Warrior and the American Unknown Soldier).
See also
External links
- Script of the sketch, www.jumpstation.ca